A wide variety of memory devices can be used to maintain and store data and instructions for various computers and similar systems. In particular, flash memory is a type of electronic memory media that can be rewritten and that can retain content without consumption of power. Unlike dynamic random access memory (DRAM) devices and static random memory (SRAM) devices in which a single byte can be erased, flash memory devices are typically erased in fixed multi-bit blocks or sectors. Flash memory devices typically are less expensive and denser as compared to many other memory devices, meaning that flash memory devices can store more data per unit area.
Flash memory has become popular, at least in part, because it combines the advantages of the high density and low cost of EPROM with the electrical erasability of EEPROM. Flash memory is nonvolatile; it can be rewritten and can hold its content without power. It can be used in many portable electronic products, such as cell phones, portable computers, voice recorders, thumbnail drives and the like, as well as in many larger electronic systems, such as cars, planes, industrial control systems, etc. The fact that flash memory can be rewritten, as well as its retention of data without a power source, small size, and light weight, have all combined to make flash memory devices useful and popular means for transporting and maintaining data.
As flash memory devices have continued to evolve, the density of data stored in such devices has increased. With the increasing density and amount of data stored that can be stored in flash devices, read errors can become an issue due in part to the close proximity of read threshold levels. Further, as erase cycles increase, read errors may occur more frequently. Typically, an error correction code (ECC) can be implemented to facilitate maintaining the accuracy and reliability of memory components, such as flash memory. ECC can detect errors in data that is read from memory components, and the ECC can also have the ability to correct the data (e.g., by reconstructing the data that contains the error into the original error-free data). Depending on the ECC algorithm used to detect and correct errors that can be associated with the data in the memory components, it can take from tens of clock cycles to tens of thousands of clock cycles to correct the data that has errors. Often times, there can be a correlation between the number of errors within a given block of data and the number of clock cycles required for an ECC to correct the errors (e.g., as the number of errors in a given block go up, the number of clock cycles to correct all of the errors can go up as well). As a result, a system requesting data from one or more memory components can wait for a relatively long period of time (e.g., thousands of clock cycles) until an ECC component corrects the requested data (e.g., particularly if there are a lot of errors associated with the data).
It is desirable to be able to implement error correction in memory components in a manner that allows for quicker reads of data from components associated with a system when the data being retrieved has errors. In addition, it is desirable to be able to reconstruct data that can be lost due to errors and/or a defect associated with a memory component (e.g., the memory component or a portion thereof becomes defective).